Wi-Fi 7 is a cabling decision before it is a Wi-Fi decision

Every wireless generation arrives the same way: the access points get specified first and the horizontal cabling gets looked at last. With Wi-Fi 7 that order costs money, because two things behind the AP have moved at the same time.

The first is the uplink. A modern high density AP can carry more than a single gigabit port will pass, so the port it lands on wants to be multi gig, and the cable behind it wants to be Cat6A rather than Cat6 if the run is long. Retrofitting that later means pulling cable through a ceiling somebody has already closed.

The second is power. Higher radio counts and more spatial streams push an AP into the upper PoE classes, which is a switch decision, not an AP decision. A switch bought on port count alone will happily accept the APs and then quietly fail to power all of them at once.

If you are pricing a wireless refresh, the honest sequence is: count the APs, check the power class each one actually draws, size the switch to that with headroom, and only then decide whether the existing horizontal cabling survives. We would rather have that conversation at the BOQ stage than after the ceiling is shut.